<snip>
Since this reply is primarily Mac help for micky, if you're only
interested in Windows related stuff, skip on to the next message.
micky, this could get a bit over the top for the Windows people, so if
you wish, feel free to take this to email if you feel it's appropriate.
If you want to do this, screenshots are very useful, and the ability
to do this is built in to OS X. Read this to find out how.
http://guides.macrumors.com/Taking_Screenshots_in_Mac_OS_X
MS made a big deal of its new "Snipping Tool" in Win 7, but it's a poor
system compared to OS X. You need 3rd party software like Irfanview to
match OS X in this case.
Also, I had to do some web searching in order to try to reply to your
questions.
Very little. Let me ask you a question. He was going away and worried
about burglars breaking in and stealing his computer. I told him a much
greater risk was harddrive failure and he should get a backup drive. He
said Yes. Because of what's below** I lent him a 1.5TB internal drive
and a BlacX caddy, and we connected it together and he bought and
installed SuperDuper. I tried to look at the backup it made, but
because I know so little about Mac, I didn't know if I was looking at
the original or thte backup. But he continued to run SuperDuper, with
scheduled backups. Months later something went wrong and his old in
and out email was missing. He looked, he said, on the backup and it
wasn't there either.
Unless I've lost track, this is on the old Mac, right? That's older
than the first Mac I ever bought, which is this Mac. LOL And I don't
have enough knowledge about his system to get very specific.
What I've learned since buying this Mac, both systems accomplish the
same things, they just do it differently with fairly drastically
different looking UI's, coupled with a totally different OS command set.
But the bottom line is it's not always that much different from
driving a Ford or Chevy when viewed from the average user's perspective.
I don't run SuperDuper, although I was going to check it out when I was
looking for an alternative to Time Machine. Time Machine is Apple's
back up program that appeared in 10.5 Leopard, it will not work in 10.4
Tiger. I purchased a competing program to SuperDuper, but never got it
installed. But I do use Time Machine, and from what I understand,
Windows 8's File History is MS's version/answer/whatever to Time Machine.
From what I see Time Machine do, it's really just an incremental backup
system that runs far more often that people have traditionally set up
their backup software to do.
There seemed to be a chance that it had run and made the backup just
like the original, no email. But it wasn't scheduled to run. I
didn't know what to say or do.
A month ago when my harddrive started clicking, I rushed to get my HD
and caddy back to make full backups. I looked at the drive first and
it had no partitions. I'm not stupid enough to give it to him that
way, and he's not technical enough to delete a partition (but the
subject is a sore one with me, even though we talked often and he hasn't
complained again, so I haven't asked him.)
NTFS and the Mac's HFS filesystems are completely different animals.
Apple apparently introduced the ability to read NTFS drives in Tiger,
but even today, OS X (AFAIK, I'm not running the current OS X Yosemite),
Mac's cannot write to NTFS drives. Using 3rd party software, you can.
I've not looked recently, but I've not found anything in Windows land
that will read Mac formatted hard drives.
I'm completely guessing here, but based on your next paragraph, you gave
him an NTFS formatted drive. When the Mac wouldn't write it, he may
have formatted it HFS for the Mac. When you got it back, Windows threw
in the towel, because it cannot read/write/format HFS formatting. So to
you, it looks empty.
If you haven't done anything to this drive yet, you could download
Gparted, the version that boots from a CD. I think it will read HFS
drives, but have never looked to see if it really can.
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/index.php
Then I found out that Mac and MS have no partition designs in common.
And I don't remember partitioning the drive at his house. I'm sure I
checked this before I gave the HD to him, but even if I didn't, how
could we/he run SuperDuper without its complaining that it couldn't
write to the harddrive. It didn't complain at all. And I know it
gave a list of drives to choose one for the To: drive and the external
drive was on the list.
What happened?
At the moment, I don't have enough info to know, only to guess at
possibilities.
1. Perhaps SuperDuper automatically formatted the destination or your
friend told it to do it.
2. Was SuperDuper configured to back up everything, or is the default
to just back up some things? Did you friend change the configuration?
3. Have you looked at the drive using a Mac to see if there's anything
on the drive?
There's just so many possibilities for a problem. Take Time Machine,
for example. While it will show me any NTFS drives/partitions, it
cannot back up an NTFS partition. So while I can read, write, and
format both NTFS and FAT drives (combo of OS X features and 3rd party
software), I only have HFS formatted partitions attached to my Mac.
<snip>
--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.8.5
Firefox 33.1
Thunderbird 31.0
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"